A Carlin Home Companion (10 page)

I'm not sure if I loved school more because it was my safe haven, or because it made me feel special. Mrs. Dresser, the principal, would often take me out of class to meet prospective students and their parents. She'd introduce me as one of the smartest kids in school. I never saw her pull anyone else out of class, so I concluded that I wasn't
one
of the smartest, but
the
smartest kid in school. This didn't make me feel superior to my classmates per se. I mean, I never had the thought, Oh, I'm smarter than they are—but it did make me feel different in a good way.

I liked most of the subjects at school, but I loved math. Unlike my home life, where the answers to problems were out of my grasp, math had problems that I could always solve. My math teacher, Ms. Wildman (whom I ate lunch with most days of the week), said that she would have to read up on algebra just to stay ahead of me. I was starved for solutions, and math fed me. For seven hours a day I didn't think about my mom's drinking or my dad's unhappiness, I just reveled in being able to solve for X.

All my teachers were great, and even my bus driver, Kathe, was cool—she'd blare the rock-and-roll station on the radio and stop at Marquez Liquors, the liquor store at the bottom of my hill, so we could buy snacks (Funyuns and Wacky Packages were my two staples) on our way home. But climbing on the school bus at the end of the day was not all fun. As we headed up Lachman Lane toward my house, I'd get really quiet. By the time we took the right onto my street, the pit of my stomach would sink like a rock. As I got off the bus, I'd look at our front door and start to wonder: Are they asleep? Are they fighting? Are they alive?

*   *   *

At the beginning of 1975, sometime during the cold of the New York winter, my grandma, Mary, had come out for a three-week vacation. Three weeks turned into three months, and three months turned into six. She and Mom had become drinking buddies. Mary, the master manipulator, fed my mom's bitterness by whispering into her ear all the ways that my father had disappointed her as a mother (never mind that she bragged about him to every person she encountered), and how, therefore, he must be a horrible husband, too. She'd do this as she was pouring my mom another glass of wine. Avoiding my mother and her moods was challenging enough for me. Avoiding my grandmother and her twisted sense of entitlement was another matter. One day Amanda and I decided to boil a few ears of corn to eat. My mother always reminded me to ask my grandma if she needed anything, so I asked her if she wanted to join us for our snack. Per her usual routine, she gave her, “Oh, no. I'll be fine. I don't need a thing” answer, so Amanda and I carried on making our own snack. A few hours later, after I'd been playing outside, I came home to find my mother sitting with my grandma and fuming. “I can't believe how selfish you are!”

Confused, I replied, “What? What are you talking about?”

“Your grandmother told me that you and Amanda made some corn and didn't even ask her if she wanted anything.”

I was stunned, perplexed, and stunningly perplexed. What the fuck was she talking about? I defended myself immediately. “Yes we did! I asked her if she wanted anything, and she said she was okay.”

My grandmother sat there with this disappointed look on her face, like she was saying, You poor child. You should be ashamed of yourself. My mom said, “Apologize.”

“But I didn't do anything wrong! She's lying.”

“Don't call your grandmother a liar.”

Had these people lost their mind? Clearly, yes. I tearfully apologized, feeling more rage than I'd ever felt in my life.

Not long after that, for Mother's Day, Dad and I took my mom and Mary to Will Rogers State Park for a picnic. The house was now clearly divided: Brenda and Mary vs. George and Kelly. After about an hour it became clear to my dad that the two of them were going to be drinking their way through the picnic, so he said to me, “Let's take a walk.” Because things had gotten so weird at home, my dad had been trying to find ways to make my life more normal. One day, he came home with a baseball bat, ball, and glove so he and I could have some quality time together playing. It was so cute. He was trying to learn how to be some idea of a “good dad.” I might have been a tomboy, but I had no wish to play baseball. But the fact that he made the effort to buy them and carve out time for us together still warms my heart. So I was more than happy to take my dad up on the offer to walk around Will Rogers, and find something fun to do. As we walked up the hill away from the polo grounds, I saw the horse barns and practice rings. A woman, the trainer, was teaching a riding class of about five or six girls. As we got closer, I felt a blossom of excitement in my chest. It reminded me of Vermont. We watched the lesson for a while, and then Dad said, “You want to do that? Take a lesson?” It was like he read my mind. But unsure about almost everything in the world that day, I only shrugged my shoulders and said, “I think so.”

He went on, “I think it would be great for you. You loved those horses in Vermont. What do you think? Should we give it a try?” I smiled and nodded my head yes. Before I knew it, Dad got the attention of the trainer, Jill, and asked her about lessons. We set an appointment for me to be there the next Saturday for a beginner's lesson.

The entire summer, I spent practically every waking moment at that barn learning how to post the trot properly, clean hooves, braid manes, and forget about the hurricane at home.

*   *   *

By the end of the summer of 1975, the damage to the Carlins was palpable. My mother barely ate, or bathed, or bothered to get out of bed. I was now calling down the hill to Marquez Liquors to order cases of wine for her. With Dad on the road a lot, there was no one to come between my mother screaming from her bed for me to bring her another glass of wine, and my dutifully bringing it to her. I knew it was killing her, but what choice did I have?

Things had been escalating for months. One night she hallucinated that the entire LAPD SWAT team had surrounded our house. She'd heard a noise, looked out the peephole in the front door, and saw blue-and-red lights everywhere. She thought that cops in cars and helicopters were everywhere. Luckily I was not there that night. Another night, when I came home from a friend's house, the therapist Al Weinstein was there. My mother had returned from a visit to a psychic on the Santa Monica Pier, and had come home and begun writhing and speaking in tongues. Al said she'd probably been hypnotized, but who really knows?

On yet another night, after I had hidden the keys to the car, my mom found them after I went to sleep, and drove my dad's brand-new BMW 3.0 down to her favorite watering hole, the San Ysidro Inn. When she got into the car to come home, instead of driving straight out of the driveway, she reversed the car straight through their lobby. The cops were called, and she got her second DUI. Strangely, the police officer who had arrested her did not show up for the court date, and the charges were dropped. Thank you, expensive Beverly Hills lawyer man.

By mid-August, Mom was down to eighty-seven pounds. She crawled to make it to the bathroom, and took in nothing more than water and wine. Her hands shook so badly that she could barely drink a drop. She had already been hospitalized once in the last year for malnutrition, but now the doctor gave her three weeks to live. Dad and I begged and begged her to go to rehab.

After a week she finally agreed to go, but she truly believed she would die there. She felt there was no hope. This was before Betty Ford. This was when rehab was the mental ward. Literally. At St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, their Chemical Dependency Center was in its infancy, and its patients were housed in the psych ward.

On August 17, 1975, my mom left our house thinking she was about to die. The doctors and counselors at St. John's thought she just might do that, too. They didn't know what to do with someone who had a triple addiction to cocaine, alcohol, and Valium. They put her on antiseizure drugs hoping that the detox wouldn't kill her. I knew none of this. I was just relieved to know that finally something might change.

 

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Sober-ish

F
OR
C
HRISTMAS OF 1975,
my alive, sober, and doing-pretty-damn-well mother insisted on getting the three of us out of town. In the past, Christmas Day with the Carlins was always abundant and joy filled. Mom bought way too many presents, and they were exactly what you wanted. Mom was Mother Christmas.

But this Christmas, because she was just getting her bearings in her newly sober life, she needed a break. Besides that, I'm not sure she wanted to replicate the Christmas from the year before. It went well enough on the actual day, but it didn't end well. Technically it almost didn't end at all. It wasn't until the week after Valentine's Day that my mother finally managed to take the tree and trimmings down. And thank God. Not only was the tree a major fire hazard, but I didn't know what to say to Amanda and Tom after mid-January had passed and the stockings were still hung with care.

So off to Hawaii we went. More specifically, the Kahala Hilton on Oahu—the place where “Hollywood” went for their Christmas paradise in the 1970s. And it
was
paradise. There were dolphins swimming in the inner lake of the hotel, poolside waitresses willing to bring my mom and me virgin strawberry daiquiris all day long, and most important, no drug-induced insanity for miles around. I was very, very happy that I was finally getting my perfect Hawaiian vacation.

At the Kahala Hilton we saw no cocaine, no alcohol, and no knives being brandished. Instead we got Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Unbeknownst to us when we booked our room there, Steve and Eydie and Sammy were doing a New Year's Eve show in the ballroom, and because we were who we were and they were who they were, we got to sit with them at their table for dinner that night. I remember it well: Eydie Gormé looking glamorous in her light-blue chiffon dress; Steve Lawrence persuading me, the pickiest eater in the world, to eat something that looked like onion rings. It was octopus. Yuck! But the octopus was quickly made up for by the show, which was a perfect seventies-trying-to-be-hip-but-oh-so-schmaltzy Steve and Eydie, with the highlight of the night being Sammy Davis, Jr., singing “The Candy Man.”

After the show we all stood around schmoozing. I hung out with my dad and Sammy Davis, Jr. They talked about all that had been going on in their lives, and my dad mentioned my mom's recent sobriety and both their battles with cocaine. Sammy chimed in about his own troubles with it, and how he was trying to move on from its insanity, too. Although I was only twelve years old, I stood there listening, nodding, and relating to what they said. I certainly knew the all-too-harsh reality of cocaine's promise of paradise.

Being there with my dad and Sammy that night after the show was the first time that I felt like I belonged. For most of my life, when I was backstage I felt invisible. Normally when Mom, Dad, and I walked into a room, all eyes moved to my father. Then people with faces beaming and hands outstretched would move toward him, telling him something they loved about him (usually a line from his show, which they would try to say just like him, and which always made me cringe) or, they handed him a gift: My favorite was a tie-dyed T-shirt with a drawing of what I assumed was my father's likeness, but because it looked more like a combination of Jesus and Charles Manson, I was never truly sure. My mother and I would then be introduced, and people would politely spend a nanosecond of time with us, but then we'd quickly be forgotten. It was as if we had just disappeared. Well, not always. Sometimes Mom got attention because she was seen as a potential conduit to Dad, and even if the person couldn't be “George's new best friend,” it was almost as good to say that they were “Brenda's new best friend.”

But for me it was different. In order for me to feel seen, I'd have to work it. We'd be backstage in some college town, and Dad would be surrounded by well-wishers, and I, feeling small and ignored, would come up to them and just wait. Then some person might glance at me, unsure of who this child was, and I'd think,
You don't know who I am, do you?
Then I'd touch my father, or ask him a question, as if to say to the doubter of my status, “I'm with him.” The other person would smile at me with comprehension in their eyes, and I would then feel safe and seen, and think,
Yes, now you understand. Now you know who I am,
believing that my status, my connection to the crackling luminosity surrounding my father, had been affirmed in their eyes. Not understanding yet that in reality, I was only trying to affirm my own status in my own eyes.

*   *   *

As my mom, dad, and I emerged out of the dark age of their chemical-fueled chaos, we weren't quite sure who we would become in the future, but at least now we knew we had one. It felt like our new life had arrived in a
Poof
! It was as if an evil spell had been broken. It was like we'd lived in a fairy tale and the wicked witch of addiction had traumatized our small village with her spooky evil force, and then,
Poof!
she was gone. We slowly walked away from our past with our hearts feeling a combination of confusion and relief; the new calm and peace alien to us, and strangely, almost as difficult as the old way. I was just unsure if I should trust it.

My mom had no doubt. She didn't just survive rehab; she conquered it. She was now an Alcoholics Anonymous rock star—attending meetings (what seemed like twelve hours a day, seven days a week) and pulling drunks out of skid row and onto their feet. Her sponsor, Tristram Colcutt III, an ex-pill-junkie who had been a renowned neurosurgeon, taught her rigorous honesty, how to have fun while sober, and the importance of service. She was alive, happy, and glowing. She once again had a purpose. She had a life.